03-26-2020, 12:12 PM
COVID-19 forces Americans to decide between the neoliberal prescription for the "free market" (in the sense that the Market is free to do dreadful things to people on behalf of shareholders and executives) and the value of human life. Such is a stark choice. We are obliged for at least a month to collectively repudiate an economic dogma that has prevailed over forty years so that people who might otherwise die get to live. It will reshape economic priorities much as a war does, except that in this war instead of literal soldiers in a combat army we have an army of the unemployed.
One month and a half is time enough for people to break some customs and habits and decide that such customs and habits are no longer relevant. Oh -- I don't have to be waited on in a restaurant? Maybe some casual-dining places will have to be reshaped into the fast-food model. (I think of Kohl's and Best Buy having grocery-style checkouts different from the pattern of the old-fashioned department stores as an analogue). A month or two without conspicuous consumption might show how empty such is.
We will also recognize what we miss.
This autumn we may even have a long-awaited, decisive shift in our political order. The sixth political party system may face a rapid transition to the seventh political party system, one perhaps initiating a social-market system.
One month and a half is time enough for people to break some customs and habits and decide that such customs and habits are no longer relevant. Oh -- I don't have to be waited on in a restaurant? Maybe some casual-dining places will have to be reshaped into the fast-food model. (I think of Kohl's and Best Buy having grocery-style checkouts different from the pattern of the old-fashioned department stores as an analogue). A month or two without conspicuous consumption might show how empty such is.
We will also recognize what we miss.
This autumn we may even have a long-awaited, decisive shift in our political order. The sixth political party system may face a rapid transition to the seventh political party system, one perhaps initiating a social-market system.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.